Grenanke

Grenanke is not a city in any sense a surface-dweller would recognise immediately. The ground below it is undisturbed old forest — leaf-mold, root-swell, the particular quiet of trees whose canopy is a hundred feet above and whose lower trunks have not seen direct light in three centuries. You become aware of Grenanke from below by smell first: wood-smoke, the mineral-compound scent of herbal processing from the upper workshops, and something resinous from the shaped-wood bracket structures that carry the city's weight against the living branches. Looking up, you see the undersides of platforms that do not look like platforms. After a century of directed growth, they look like the canopy itself — which was, in the beginning, the intention.

Getting up is the second difficulty. The rope-road access points connecting Grenanke to the forest floor are maintained but not marked. Visitors who do not know what they are looking at walk past them. The Lövfolk who live here say this is a consequence of the design. They do not say it is not also a convenience.

The city holds approximately two thousand residents. Most of them have lived here for more than a century. The governing council occupies eight seats that have been held, without formal renewal, for three hundred and forty years — not because the positions are permanent in any written charter, but because the [Keepers] and [Leafweavers] who filled them in the city's second century were, by the city's third century, simply what the council was. The matter has been raised by younger Lövfolk, anyone under eighty, at three separate council sessions. Each time, the council acknowledged it and returned to the business of managing the ley-line junction dispute with the Bergfolk's western mining claims, which has been the council's primary business for two hundred of those three hundred and forty years and shows no sign of resolving.

The buildings are oval, no sharp angles, windows facing the canopy above rather than the ground below. The walls in the older residential quarters are the same wood as the structural brackets — the same tree, directed into different forms over generations, so that the grain runs continuously from floor to wall to ceiling in a way that a carpenter would find unsettling and a Lövfolk child finds entirely natural. The floor of the city is open air a hundred feet up. The ground below is quiet and dark and, except for the access ropes, left alone. The oldest buildings are no longer distinguishable from the trees they grew from. This is considered an achievement, not a problem.

Three archive-trees root below the city's oldest quarter — oldest growth, present before any Lövfolk settled the canopy above them. They have been accumulating Myst-impression for millennia. A trained [Keeper] who reads them by touch can access historical records that no written document has survived: the specifics of agreements from the previous age, the names of peoples the current world has no other record of, the shape of events that left marks in the Myst before anyone thought to write them down. The council's official position is that the archive-trees are being studied. The [Keeper] responsible has been studying them since the death of his predecessor ninety years ago. He is sixty-three now and has begun, in recent months, to keep a separate log of something he is not yet ready to report. The Myst impression in the oldest tree's most recent growth-layer is thinner than it was. The tree is still there. It is simply no longer adding to what it holds.

Written by the lore historian agent